Is the iPad the standard for tablets?
[I:http://www.buyadigitalcamera.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/AlexSpeirs28.jpg]Gone are our once loved bulky laptops. Gone too are the bulky and less intuitive tablets that showed so much promise but delivered less and left us wanting more. Welcome in 2010 and with it the market transformer of tablet PCs known affectionately as the iPad.
11 months later and version 2 hit the market; thinner, faster and lighter and snapped up by yet more eager fans waiting to experience a refined version of an already excellent product. So is iPad the standard for tablets and is anyone competing with it out there?
Throw into the mixing bowl the iPad 2′s sales stats since its launch last month and you might be blown away by the total results!
So is iPad the standard for tablets? First, we need to look at the competition in tablet PCs. As well as Apple’s iPad , Google Android makes tablets too which always means that Apple can expect some competition. Big name manufacturers like HP, LG and Samsung are all reportedly interested in joining with the Android operating system to nudge Apple of its perch over the next year. ‘By the end of 2012, Android tablets will rapidly overtake the iPad in market share,’ forecasts expert Sascha Pallenberg during the Droidcon developers’ conference in Berlin. He says Android can achieve this by ‘sheer mass’.
Apple currently sells 9 out of 10 of the tablets sold so I doubt it is quaking in its boots just yet! It is too early to tell how well the iPad 2 is selling as official figures are yet to be released, however some analysts suggest that sales will indeed surpass expectations owing to a dramatic increase In distribution points. Check out online reviews and you will see that Motorola’s Xoom is the closest competition to iPad 2 in terms of specs but it just isn’t inspiring enough for me.
So, is Apple’s iPad the standard for tablets? Yes. Apple, much like it did with the iPhone has set the standard by which all other tablet computers will be measured. Apple has undoubtedly revolutionized the market for tablet computers, but whether that is enough to retain the utter dominance the iPad has so far achieved in the tablet market remains to be seen.
This article was written by Alex Speirs of TXT2GET, a leading SMS mobile marketing company. To learn how to best use mobile technology such as the iPad in your marketing, visit the TXT2GET blog.